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In theory mobile carriers should bring competitive pressure to the broadband space. My sister-in-law's family in Japan has access to cheap broadband but they don't even use it, they all use pocket wifi. Now mobile internet sucks for some things and omg caps are teh worst but at least t-mobile is moving away from caps and most of comcast's customers are not counterstrike players.

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Mobile carriers, at least here in the US, are extremely limited with backhaul. They can support high burst speeds, but they can't handle high traffic loads. That's one of the reasons why the data caps are so low on mobile (e.g., 5GBs) vs broadband (e.g., 500GBs). Otherwise, yes, a lot of people would ditch their cable/DSL and just use a mobile datacard/modem.

Strange, I would have expected spectrum to be the limiting factor. Shouldn't backhaul be much cheaper to and easier to improve for them?

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